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Mr Fraser
This is an elephant in the room. There is no chance that the companies that set up these Pension Schemes can deliver. Look at the telephones set up when it was a monopoly with hundreds of thousands of workers now a decreasing slice of a shrinking market for fixed line with tens of thousands of workers. Even with the increased productivity of the slimmed down workforce there is no way that they can produce enough value to support these past promises and if BT goes bust because of this who benefits? Not the workers, not the customers and not the pensioners.
The Government will have to face up to this time bomb. The PPF will not be able to cope with a fund the size of the Telecoms going belly up, other pension funds would be cut adrift by their companies as they couldn't or wouldn't be able to pay the levies. When the libility for government pensions actually makes it onto the Treasury's accounts, then the real panic starts and I don't have an answer. Maybe the age to draw your pension should be set at 3 years less than life expectancy but remember that the first old age pension was set at about twice life expectancy at 80 and was really a recognition that no ordinary person could be expected to work at that age or to have saved enough to support themselves till they died.

Meanwhile, health officials report that due to the explosion in obesity the current generation will be the first to have a shorter lifespan than their parents

Life expectancy has been increasing for men in the UK every year since 1945. Anyone suggesting there is something new and unexpected is dishonest. As in so many other instances those who manage and invest money are just trying to justify increasing their "share" without it being grounded in prudent management or competence. It is outrageous that a defence is being prepared to excuse the pension providers from meeting their obligations. It won't be a surprise when they endeavour to slither out of their commitments by claiming that something unforeseen and unforeseeable has happened.

This just goes to show how extremely valuable are the pensions that MPs get. Employment Tribunals have decided that pensions are part of pay. If MPs are to have a revision to their pay, their platinum-plated pensions should be considered at the same time.
The same applies to the index-linked guaranteed pensions of civil servants et al.; these get more valuable as life expectancy increases. Meanwhile final salary schemes are being abandoned in the private sector.
To show all this, the pay of public servants and other employees should be shown with the add-on pension percentage of employer's contribution. Then we might no longer hear that civil servants are underpaid!

Aren't we missing something here? Just before I started work in the early seventies we were told by our teachers that if we worked hard and paid our taxes we would be looked after by the system. I duly obliged then was told, in the nineties, that they had spent my pension and that the government could no longer afford to pay me the pension that I had been paying into, through National Insurance, all my working life. So, I would have to use more of my money to establish another pension for my self.
As far as I can make out, the government have spent my pension on their pet projects and wars with the hope that we would produce more children, who will then produce more National Insurance to cover my looming pension. If this was any other type of savings then this would be tantamount to theft of my hard earned money but because it is pension money then everybody rolls their eyeballs upwards and sighs with a few tuts here and there.
It is no solice to me and millions of other law-abiding people who fell for that line, which was fed to us in the seventies, that this has happened to everyone. That is just not good enough! You, the government, have forcibly (I had no option but to pay this National Insurance) taken my money for all those years and now you have left me out to dry while your pensions, which we have paid for, are guaranteed.
In my mind this is theft on a grand scale as it amounts to billions, if not trillions of pounds. Then you have the audacity to claim that it is our fault for living longer. No, it is not our fault for living longer but your fault for spending my money in the first place. Instead of investing our money in a high interest account you have whittled it away because you did not find it politically expedient to raise taxes to pay for your grand schemes as it was easier for you to raid our pensions. Shame on you and a curse on all your houses as you enjoy your MPs pensions while we, the law-abbiding National Insurance payers at the bottom of the ladder, will have to live on Social Security.

If 1,2,5 or 10% of North Sea oil revenue had been invested over the last 35 years how much would it be worth?

Enough to cover any pensions shortfall perhaps? Just like poor old Norway.

Peter1970,

If all the North Sea oil revenue had been invested over the last 35 years you would still have a pension shortfall, Mr G Brown MP would have made sure of that.